Turning dead deer into good soil http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.21/turning-dead-deer-into-good-soil
A pilot program in Oregon transforms roadkill into compost.Viewed from several yards away, the fragments of fur and bone woven through the pile of woodchips gave it an oddly debonair appearance, like some sort of macabre tweed. We didn't detect a whiff of anything nasty -- until we walked downwind of a recently disturbed mound.

"That must be the five deer we picked up Monday after rodeo weekend. When I saw all those trucks and trailers coming through here, I knew it would be bad," said Shawn King, Oregon Department of Transportation, or ODOT, District 12 transportation maintenance manager, scrunching up her nose.

On a sweltering August afternoon, we stood inside a fenced area north of Heppner, where King's department runs a roadkill compost center. On an asphalt slab, a grid of concrete barriers formed four bays. Two were posted CLOSED, indicating the compost was ready: no visible flesh present, the mixture having reached at least 130 degrees Farenheit on three consecutive readings to kill off any germs.

Dead animals wind up here through various channels -- hauled in by the highway crew, as well as by state Fish and Wildlife, the state police and two nearby cities. "We get all sorts of critters," King said. "Deer, porcupine, skunks … If someone brings in a dog, we try to get to its owner so they can come pick it up."

The pilot project, initiated in 2010, has been successful enough to become eastern Oregon's official method of roadkill disposal. In the old days, crews just dragged carcasses off the road to "let the magpies and coyotes have them" or dumped them in an open pit at the quarry -- much to the delight of local dogs, though not necessarily their owners.

Roadkill disposal is a serious problem nationally, as stricter environmental regulations close burial pits, landfills run out of space, and many rendering plants shut down. But composting is becoming a popular alternative -- Montana, Washington and New York now have sites. It cost ODOT $11,600 to develop its site and acquire permits, and it takes $6,500 a year to keep it going. So far, roughly 500 deer and hundreds of other miscellaneous animals have been transformed into nutrient-rich soil conditioner. Eventually, the process might yield enough compost for highway crews to use for roadside planting. So far, however, it produces just enough to sustain the compost starter, like keeping a jar of sourdough going for future batches of pancakes.

An enormous yellow truck stopped outside the gate. A stocky fellow in a red ODOT cap and a neon safety vest jumped out. "This works just like a regular compost at home. You put the carcass on a pile, keep it moist and aerated (for several months), and it cooks and decomposes," explained Michael Bennett, transportation maintenance specialist. "It's good for the environment, there's a place to get rid of dead animals. It would be a huge asset for bigger cities if they all worked together."

Once a wildlife casualty arrives, workers use a bucket loader to place it on a thick layer of woodchips, preferably close to another rotting carcass to generate more heat. Then they sprinkle it with a layer of starter and more woodchips, and turn the whole mess occasionally until it's done decomposing, which can take several months. "It cooks better if we hose it down as we turn it," Bennett said. "That way the water saturates the pile instead of running off."

At one of the closed piles, he cleared away a couple of inches of the dull, dry surface. Underneath, the stuff looked like fertile loam and smelled vaguely fecund. He thrust in a moisture probe and sank a thermometer next to it. The meter hit 100 percent and the thermometer read 140 degrees -- just perfect. "Everything breaks down eventually." He whacked a leg bone on the concrete barrier, breaking it apart. "See that? Like a dry, hollow squash in your garden."

Tour over, I climbed into the truck cabin and Bennett pulled onto the road. A magpie flew in and perched atop the largest pile. His scavenging mission foiled, he tilted his head back and screeched indignantly.

]]>No publisherWildlife2012/12/19 01:00:00 GMT-7ArticleOn the front line of mental illness and violencehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/on-the-front-line-of-mental-illness-and-violence
The National Rifle Association acts as a terrorist organization in its efforts to limit gun controlMoments after I entered the room where the patients locked in the secure area tend to hang out, a young man asked me for enough meds to “put him to sleep” until the day of his commitment hearing.

“If I’m asleep, I won’t say anything that they can use against me,” he said calmly, indicating that he wasn’t completely out of his mind and that the methamphetamines he’d taken had worn off.

Someone in the community had found him incoherent and uncooperative and notified the authorities that he needed help. Then his car was found on the interstate with loaded guns inside. On a previous occasion, when he was brought to the emergency room, jacked up on meth, he wore a pistol strapped to his ankle.

Still convinced that people were after him, he told me there that he had a “right to carry a sidearm into any public place except a school.” Many things about his delusions and violent statements were downright scary, but even more terrifying was this: Here was someone who thought he had a constitutional right to come to a hospital armed.

I work as a psychiatric nurse on a unit where we routinely treat patients who have guns at home, including assault weapons. Many of those patients have been previously committed, which means they have a documented record of mental illness. Yet it is not uncommon to hear these patients brag about the ease with which they can purchase guns without “hassle” (background checks). How is it possible for mentally ill people, especially those with a history of violence, to obtain guns?

One chronically mentally ill patient in his 50s, who lives with his mother, told me he walked into Walmart and bought a rifle because it was “cheap.” His frequent stays in the state hospital were no obstacle to the purchase. During a casual conversation shortly before he was discharged, he told me he bought the gun for just over a hundred dollars, a purchase he made with his disability check.

When medicated, this man is easygoing and docile. He doesn’t believe he has a mental illness, or that he needs medication. When he stops taking the pills, however, the demons inside him resurface. His mother, his sole source of support, reported that she knows he’s in trouble when he aims the gun at her.

After release from whatever institution will hold them long enough for them to be stabilized, patients frequently refuse to comply with further prescribed treatment. Who wants to wash down pills that make you feel hungry all the time, or feel sluggish, or make it impossible to maintain an erection and even make you drool? Their judgment goes down the toilet along with their prescriptions.

Without the drugs that silence the voices or suppress the rage, they again begin to lose touch with reality. It’s only a matter of time before crisis workers or the police pick them up and bring them in to an emergency room. It is the ones who come in armed that give me pause.

When I read about the mass murder in Aurora, Colo., it amplified my conviction that something must be done to enact gun control -- STAT.

Whatever diagnosis this young man gets, he should never have been able to buy assault weapons powerful enough to blast through concrete walls, nor should he have been able to buy an unregulated arsenal of bullets.

One of my co-workers defended the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Another reminded me that guns are not about to disappear from a country where people distrust the government; people feel the need to be armed in case of internal attack, she said.

I don’t win these kinds of arguments at work, and my opinion falls on deaf ears in Washington, D.C. The system is clearly broken. The National Rifle Association calls the shots, and too many elected officials have become afraid to stand up to them. Gun advocates have direct access to media and online outlets to induce fear, generate paranoia and encourage citizens to arm themselves in order to fight for their “constitutional right to bear arms.”

The result? A single, powerful organization promotes violence through distortion, hate-mongering and paranoia. It leaves many of us in fear for our lives, robbing us of the freedom to do something as simple as go to the movies without fear of attack from a fellow American. If this isn’t terrorism, I don’t know what is.

Eliza Murphy is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She writes in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.

]]>No publisherPoliticsWriters on the Range2012/08/03 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleOregon sculptor turns beach trash into meaningful arthttp://www.hcn.org/issues/43.4/Oregon%20sculptor-turns-beach-trash-into-meaningful-art
Angela Haseltine Pozzi makes thought-provoking art from the trash that washes up on Oregon's beaches.South of Bandon, Ore., along Highway 101, there perches a 12-foot-tall bird with wings made of flip-flop soles and a belly of plastic lids. Its fishing-float feet are held in place by knotted plastic fishing line. The bird, which resembles the love child of an albatross, an eagle and a seagull, is just one of the huge sculptures of marine life that artist and teacher Angela Haseltine Pozzi creates and displays at Art 101, her workshop and gallery.

Born to a family of artists in Portland, Ore., Pozzi spent her childhood summers "tidepooling" at the beach. She taught art for 30 years before returning in 2007 to the coastal town of Bandon to recover from the tragic loss of her husband. Shocked by the plastic flotsam littering the coast, the now 53-year-old Pozzi recruited community members to help clean up the beach. From their gleanings she now builds sculptures she hopes will prompt viewers to reconsider their consumption habits.

High Country News Why and when did you start using beach debris in your art?

Angela Haseltine Pozzi I first noticed plastic washing up 20 years ago. Then there was more and more. I ignored it because I didn't want to see it. When it became so much in the past two years, I realized I could no longer use thrift store finds and purchased plastic and supplies to make art like I had been doing. I needed to look at the ocean long and hard, and I needed to use only plastic from the beach. It was terrifying at first, because I changed my entire way of working.

I first used the beach trash in the "sea cave," a permanent installation at my gallery that's full of sea creatures that glow in the dark when you pull the curtain. The exhibit laid the groundwork to do more powerful social commentary about how human beings endanger the world's sea life.

HCN Why did you decide to enlist the community in your effort to clean up the beach and to make art out of it?

Pozzi I didn't want this to be about me making a product, but directing the process so that its tentacles could keep extending outward. Once people saw what I was doing, they got excited and wanted to help. Twenty people collected from scattered places between North Bend and Port Orford. We also had a beach cleanup, and we partnered with the state parks to have them bring us the garbage. Ninety-eight percent of it is plastic. We processed 4,000 pounds of plastic in eight months. There's 1,500 pounds from the past two months waiting to be processed.

HCN How do you process the plastic?

Pozzi We dump it in bins and hose it down. The big stuff we set aside to use in large pieces. We have a separate zone for the stuff that stinks. Rope is really smelly. The small stuff goes into buckets with biodegradable soap to soak for a few days. Then it gets dumped in the sieves, rinsed again. We let rain rinse it, the sun dry it in the summer. Then we sort it again, by types, sizes, shapes.

Every piece gets drilled, strung with wire, then either stitched or strung like beads. Then it gets stitched onto wire mesh, then onto chicken wire, and then onto the armatures, which are made of recycled rebar welded by local high school students.

I'm a little scared of what handling all that toxicity will do to me and my workers. It's nasty stuff, I know it's not healthy. We wear gloves and goggles. I try to protect everybody.

HCN What do you hope to offer people who see your exhibits?

Pozzi I want them to see it as a problem, that there's all this plastic washing ashore. (The art) needs to be so big that people can't ignore it. A giant fish gets attention, but it has to be really good to get people to keep looking at it, to not see it as just a pile of garbage. These are purposefully made sea creatures that say, "Look, I'm made of plastic. The fish out there? They're eating plastic. You have to stop this."

HCN What sort of responses have you gotten to your work?

Pozzi A wide range, from crying to "This changed the way I think." People are eager to tell others about it. Sorting the plastic is gut-wrenching for a lot of people: "I'll never see the beach the same again." People keep coming back to help; it gives them a sense of purpose.

Garbage is a metaphor for life. If you're able to face garbage, see it for what it is, pick it up, do something with it to help the world, that's the ultimate good thing.

Pozzi's latest show, "Washed Ashore," is on display at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport until April 13.

]]>No publisherCommunities2011/03/25 00:00:00 GMT-6ArticleA geography of the imaginationhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/341/16879
In Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited
by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney, 45 diverse writers define
unusual geographical terms used across the country.At first glance, Home Ground resembles a straightforward encyclopedia of geography. But crack the book open, and you find yourself in unexpected territory, a geography of the imagination that blends literature, science, folklore and history.

Author and editor Barry Lopez got the idea for the book after a frustrating attempt to find a definition for blind creek. He elicited the assistance of his partner, freelance editor Debra Gwartney, in what became a monumental four-year project. After winnowing down a list of geography terms lodged in Lopez’s memory, they selected 45 writers from around the country, invited scientists to join an advisory board, and assembled a team of researchers. Each writer was given 20 words, a list of references, and best of all, freedom to use his imagination to define the terms. The responses, and the voices, range widely; some are straightforward and succinct while others are poetic and elegiac.

“The strength of a community is built on the preservation of individual voices,” Lopez said during a recent interview over lunch, likening the project to an “act of citizenship similar to the WPA in the ’30s.”

Voices holler, whisper, lament and sometimes rant, not from the page, but from jollas, colinas, tuckamores, and glades. Each voice is as distinctive as the landscape it describes, emerging from an intimate connection to a place called home.

The luscious vernacular terms create a distinctive, imaginative terrain: desire path, “the route people have chosen to take across an open place,” jaral, “where the vegetation makes progress difficult,” mezquital, “an unruly and haphazard zone,” nunatak, a “lonely peak.” Roll the words around in your mouth, let them sink into your marrow, for many of them are as much endangered as the landscapes they describe.

Lopez said he hopes that this book will “elevate conversation about the fate of place, about something hugely important.” True to the meaning of the word geography, which includes the human impact on the earth, Home Ground reveals the deep and often uneasy connections between people and the land. Linda Hogan describes zanja, the “system of ditches … Indian people were coerced into helping develop” in Southern California. And Joy Williams describes a coral reef as “a living underwater Xanadu” threatened by human activities such as “warming ocean temperatures … sewage runoff and the phosphorous-laden, nutrient-rich wastewater produced by agriculture.”

It’s not surprising to hear that environmental attorneys are grateful for this book. Lopez said the book gives them a way to argue more descriptively for the places they fight to protect: “They have a new set of tools in their toolbox.”

Nestled within the definitions are bits of literature and poetry, and clues about the settling of the country and the many migrations of its varied inhabitants. The words have rich histories, deriving from Indian, European, Arabic and Pacific Rim languages — drumlin, estero, esplanade, lek, pali, pingo. The range of terms reveals the cross-cultural settling of the nation’s landscape. “This is a map of the colonization of America,” Gwartney said during the interview.

Much more than a dictionary of picturesque, lovely terms — arroyo, glory hole, kiss tank, loblolly, misfit stream, sugarloaf, yazoo — Home Ground is, in Lopez’s words, an “anatomy of a landscape.”

“Gray did an anatomy of the body. You take the whole and break it into its constituent parts. At a certain point, you see the whole thing, you see all of North America — rain-soaked, semi-tropical, and cold-winter Minnesota,” Lopez said, between spoonfuls of squash soup.

As several of the contributors point out, it’s common to read the land as though it’s a human body, with our own anatomy inspiring our names for the earth. An arch is a “rib bone of earth”, and a ceja “a line of trees at the edge of a meadow, or the thin strip of clouds above a chain of mountains… each resembles an eyebrow.” The lava tongues and the mouths of the planet have much to say to us, if we dare to listen.

The author writes from Portland, Oregon, where she is learning to read the landscape she calls home.

Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape Edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney 480 pages, hardcover: $29.95. Trinity University Press, 2006.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesBooksArticleConspiring with caddisflieshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/335/16703
A Seattle artist known only as Ferg works with tiny
caddisfly larvae to make jewelry from the insects’ intricate
casings"He hath ribbons of all the colours i’
the rainbow; inkles, caddisses, cambrics and
lawns."

He
says "I make dreamtime trophies. And I feel
pretty certain that the spirit is the intellect of the soul."

Aquatic, six-legged, caterpillar-like creatures,
caddisfly larvae crawl slowly across stream bottoms, gathering bits
of leaves, gravel, twigs and sand. Using a sticky silk excreted
from its mouth, the caddisfly, or periwinkle, glues the debris into
a protective casing it wears for several months.

A few
years ago, Ferg, a tall, lanky, dreadlocked Seattle artist, watched
a caddisfly emerge from a miniature castle in a friend’s
aquarium. The glass tank’s floor was lined with
bubble-gum-pink pebbles, and the periwinkle had used them to build
a gaudy casing. That pink periwinkle remained dormant in
Ferg’s imagination for a few years, then hatched as
inspiration: He decided to try to work in cahoots with the tiny
creatures.

On an October morning, the results of that
collaboration sit in Ferg’s palm, illuminated by the sunlight
shining through his studio window. The fragile, tubular forms,
slightly smaller than pieces of penne pasta, glimmer in the light.
One is encrusted with garnet, turquoise and bits of gold leaf;
another is a jumble of opals, micro nautilus shells and minuscule
fossils. "This is an orchestration of how color can bling," says
Ferg, "of how beautiful the periwinkles create."

Ferg
calls the gem-spangled forms "graffiti trains" after the
graffiti-covered boxcars that were among his earliest influences.
He collects periwinkles from waterways in the Cascade Mountains. At
home, he puts them in tanks filled with spring water, letting them
acclimate to their new digs before putting them to work.

These aren’t dimestore goldfish tanks, their bottoms layered
with impossibly aqua stones. The periwinkles strut on retractable
forelegs over sparkling floors, choosing tiny baubles to add to
their casings. Ferg uses a special file to flatten one side of the
little gems, making them easier for the periwinkles to grab hold
of.

After several months, a periwinkle seals itself
inside its casing. More months pass, then the caddisfly, now
morphed into an adult, cuts its way out of the case and "hatches."
An aquatic cousin of moths and butterflies, the insect gets its
scientific name, Trichoptera, from its adult stage, in which it
sports a pair of hairy wings. But its common name comes from the
larval casing — it’s derived from caddice men,
Renaissance-era cloth merchants who pinned their colorful wares to
their coats.

Ferg intervenes before the cocoon stage,
teasing the larvae out of their gem-studded casings and placing
them in abandoned casings he has found in the wild. Then he returns
them to their native streams. "The periwinkle probably won’t
even know what happened," Ferg says. "That’s their purpose,
to eat and build the shell." He keeps the "little gem jackets" and
reinforces them with jeweler’s glue. He’s still
experimenting with making jewelry from them, trying to find a way
to reveal their beauty while protecting their fragility.

As a child, Ferg left no stone unturned in his quest to become
intimate with the natural world; rock hunting with his parents and
tromping through creeks fed his innately fertile imagination. After
one of his brothers was murdered, Ferg sought solace in art and in
his love of wild things. In addition to periwinkles, he keeps
unusual insects in a handmade cage in his kitchen. From the
carcasses of katydids, beetles and praying mantises he fashions
strange new creatures, like a double-headed beetle painted in
metallic purple and silver. Some of these wind up in his miniature
natural history museum, their invented names displayed on placards
in tiny rooms whose floors are covered in leaf skeletons.

"Creativity is my medicine," he says. "It is a God-given natural
antidote to my pain."

The author, known to
salvage roadkill and bits of detritus for inclusion in box shrines,
writes from Portland, Oregon.

]]>No publisherWildlifeArtPoliticsProfilesArticleCaught in the Headlightshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/291/15255
Personal obsession leads one woman into a world of
scientists, wildlife rehabilitators and eccentric artists who are
fascinated by the bloody relationship between wildlife and
roads. Fifteen years ago, I left my husband,
and the West, behind, returning heartbroken to my native Northeast.
I felt like I’d been clobbered by the tires of a half-ton
truck, and I walked through the world wounded. But I fooled myself
into believing I was merely on a temporary solo journey; I kept my
grief under wraps. Until the day I ran over a kitten. The little
animal had darted out from the weeds, and the driver in front of me
also tried unsuccessfully to avoid it. As I felt my tires smash the
tiny body, my sorrow hit me, full force.

I sobbed so hard
driving home to my cabin that I veered off course, my truck tires
hitting the gravel shoulder. There was no oomph
in my accelerator foot. My chest hurt from having slept for weeks
curling my shoulders around my heart.

I realized then
that the only way through my grief was out. My life felt fleeting,
miniscule. I had to look out at the world beyond myself.

As I drove home late one night, my headlights illuminated a
motionless lump in my lane. It was a red fox. This was no place to
end a life. I stopped, got out of my car and lifted the body. It
was a recent kill, warm and softer than anything I had ever
touched. No wonder people wear fur coats. They ought to wear them
outside in, with nothing on underneath.

It draped over my
hands, its head as floppy as a newborn’s. I carried it down
the bank and placed it beneath a thicket. I left an aster on its
breathless body.

After the fox came a porcupine. That,
too, I removed from the road. Then squirrels, raccoons, snakes,
frogs, weasels, mink, songbirds, chipmunks, even worms. It seemed
undignified to leave them; they deserved a more honorable end than
being smeared across the asphalt.

I started offering
apologies. I wished for an animal’s safe passage, and wished
its relatives and descendants adaptation to roads — and I
made a plea for human wisdom to set in quick.

A few years
later, in graduate school in St. Paul, Minn., my private devotional
practice became an obsession. I searched the public library, but
found only dissatisfying and paltry information. As spring erupted
and animals came out of hibernation, I got very busy peeling
carcasses off the pavement. I could not get roadkill out of my
thoughts. I had to know how many animals got hit each day. Did cars
put certain species at risk? Did anyone out there care enough to do
something about it?

Without an itinerary or a single
lead, I set out at the end of May on a cold, damp Midwestern day. I
headed west again in my aging Volvo with a shovel in the trunk, a
new notebook, pens, and a yearning to find people who were doing
something with or about roadkill. I stopped in all sorts of places
— saloons, flea markets, fish and wildlife offices, highway
department garages, diners, art galleries and natural history
museums. I went by hunches. I positioned myself on the fringe.

In a Rapid City, S.D., gallery, a fellow told me in a
hushed voice about harvesting quills from road-killed porcupines to
make jewelry. Like many people I met along the way, he was
reluctant to speak openly about his scavenging. Federal and state
laws prohibit collection of certain animals, from the road or
otherwise. Unless you’re a Native American with a religious
permit, it’s illegal to possess an eagle feather. If you hit
a deer in Arizona, you can salvage the meat, but in Oregon
it’s illegal.

Over grits and hot sauce in a diner
in Laramie, Wyo., the father of the carpenter who had taught me how
to two-step the night before at the Buckhorn Saloon told me about
"green-up." In the spring, land close to the highway heats up
faster than higher ground, encouraging all sorts of vegetation to
push up through the thawed earth. The yummy greens attract hungry
pronghorn and deer, luring them dangerously close to traffic.

Those brief encounters nudged me through a tiny door and
into something bigger: a growing network of professionals devoted
to exploring the complex relationship between human beings and
animals that is created by roads. This work would consume much of
the next decade of my life, as I drove tens of thousands of miles
and talked to hundreds of people. I wrecked the front end of my
Volvo twice, once hitting a buck and later, a fawn. I removed at
least a thousand dead animals from the road.

Along the
way, I found not only tragedy, but also people who were devoted to
preventing roadkill. I also learned a new language, one made of
sinew, muscle, bone, feather, blood and gristle.

Art that dies to live

There is a palpable, raw
energy beneath the veneer of respectability that the galleries,
museum, tchotchke shops and ice cream parlor lend to Madrid, N.M.,
(emphasis on "Mad"). The former mining town looks like a place
where gunslingers and outlaws might drift through, hoping to stir
up some trouble.

I was on my first roadkill research
trip, headed north from Albuquerque to Santa Fe and trying to avoid
interstates, when I landed in this unkempt assemblage of ramshackle
buildings. Outside the No Pity Café, a sculpture that bore a
vague resemblance to a totem pole caught my eye: a tall tree stump
with a gnarled root ball on top, its sides hung with skulls, bones,
bits of rusty metal and chunks of broken glass. (I later learned
that the sculpture’s name was "Medusa.")

Across the
road, at the Jack of All Arts gallery, I found more sculptures by
the same local artist: castles fashioned from broken glass,
miniature motorcycles made of bones. I had to track down this
artist. After a sporadic correspondence by mail, we finally hooked
up on my second road trip a few years later.

North of
Madrid on State Highway 14, the Turquoise Trail, I met human
firecracker Tammy Jean Lange, also known as Tatt2 Tammy from her
years as a tattoo artist. Lange is a hyperkinetic Little Orphan
Annie, with a head full of red curls and a raucous laugh.

Hers is no ordinary yard. This acre of desert is the site of Tiny
Town, an ever-evolving miniature ghost town with its own saloon,
church, courthouse, jail — even an auto body shop. A
scavenger, Lange uses all sorts of things that would otherwise have
ended up in the dump or been abandoned along the roadside. "If it
ain’t broken, busted or rusted," she says, she has no use for
it. A cast-off skylight forms the roof of the saloon. Tarpaper with
a dotted yellow line serves as a road through the miniature ghost
town. Broken glass fills three shallow troughs, forming rivers.

Bones, Lange reserves for special purposes.

She
cannot drive by a lovely bone, whitened by desert sun, or pass up a
beautiful animal carcass. People frequently alert her to dead
animals; roadkill provides a nearly ready source of raw materials.
She buries the carcasses, to "do what they got to do" —
decompose — and later digs them up and cleans and bleaches
the bones.

Bones go into motorcycle sculptures, or
"Gnarleys," one of which stands, life-size, near the entrance to
Tiny Town. On a recent visit, Lange mounted the cow-skull seat,
grabbed the antler handlebars with their dangling lace hair
scrunchies and Mardi Gras beads, and pretended to rev it up. "My
friend put this on the back of his flatbed and he drove me through
the parade in Madrid," she says. "Let me tell you, I was the
parade."

Lange also uses bones to make the residents of
Tiny Town — dolls with names like Bony Rider, who met his
doom at the town guillotine, becoming "Basket Case" when Lange
caught his remains in a basket. Hidden away in one of the trailers
that serves as her studio is her "dominatrix doll," made from bones
reassembled into a human form, wearing a hand-sewn black leather
jacket, miniskirt and thigh-high boots. A bit macabre, the doll
shares the dimensions of Barbie, but not the proportions.

"I resurrect the dead animals and I give them a new life," she
says. "It’s art that dies to live."

Entirely
self-taught, Lange is an artist with an inner drive. Making art is
something she must do, and when she’s not creating,
unhappiness and irritability set in. When times get slim, she works
as a tattoo artist and landscaper in nearby Portales. But lately,
she’s been having a hard time keeping up with the demand for
her art.

Several years ago, an art scout saw some of her
work and arranged to have Tiny Town boxed and shipped to the
Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. The museum is the first in the
country dedicated to "outsider" or "visionary" art, created outside
the confines of mainstream "high art." Lange and her mother flew
out for the opening, but Lange hid in the basement for the whole
event. "I see people when I want to see people," she says. "I just
want to make my art."

Cool dead
stuff

I knew when I saw the "Welcome to the Snake Pit"
sign on biologist Randy Babb’s office door that my hunch had
been correct: There was a treasure at the Arizona Department of
Game and Fish in Mesa.

As I walked into Babb’s
office, a small rattlesnake shook its tail at me from its glass
house on the floor, and a turtle crawled around inside a nearby
cardboard box. Mounted quail with their question-mark headdresses
adorned the wall. Stacks of paper and towers of books hid his
desktop.

Babb looked like the kind of person I’d
trust to take me on a safari, or a trek into the desert. Trim,
clean-shaven and bespectacled, he wore hiking boots, sensible long
pants, and a white button-down shirt. As the department’s
Information and Education Program manager, Babb’s innate
inquisitiveness about all things that squirm, slither, hop, crawl
and fly — even after they’ve stopped moving around
— serves him well.

Over the course of several
years, I’ve tagged along with Babb as he trapped bats, lifted
the walls of caved-in buildings to chase lizards, climbed into a
dry cistern to retrieve a desert shrew — and caught a myriad
of insects to feed that shrew, whose fuel needs rivaled those of
the thirstiest SUVs. But some of the most interesting moments have
come driving around in search of what he calls "cool dead stuff."

Only a trained eye can distinguish between a stick and a
snake from the driver’s seat. Babb, a herpetologist —
someone who studies reptiles and amphibians — has an uncanny
ability to tell the difference, even at 40 miles an hour.

During the late-summer monsoon season, Babb checks the Internet
frequently to watch for storms forming. With his truck packed with
the tools of his trade — snake tongs, pillowcases, buckets,
and boxes for both live and dead animals — he heads for the
areas where a few drops of rain could coax all sorts of creatures
out of hiding. He sustains his high energy with Dr Pepper and the
gooey orange candy called Circus Peanuts. All food is the same, he
says, "microbially speaking."

Some roadkills he gives to
schoolteachers, or uses in the educational kits his department
prepares for classrooms. "There’s a lot to be learned from
looking at animal parts, looking at the beaks of birds or feet and
figuring out what they do," he says. "I usually salvage skulls from
roadkill. They’re a good way to learn about carnivores or
herbivores or omnivores, just looking at the dentition."

Some of the fresher finds end up on his barbecue grill, while
others become meals for the snakes and other animals he keeps in a
room off his garage, some of them rescued from the roads.
Interesting roadkills go into his freezer. A gifted scientific
illustrator, Babb prefers to draw his subjects when they’re
still. "Roadkill has always been a good way to look at stuff that
you never get in hand," he says. "Birds that you see flying over,
or animals you just catch a glimpse at — when they’re
dead on the road you can look at them close."

Road-killed
animals can also serve as the "voucher specimens" that tell
scientists where certain species are found. In the 1980s, for
example, on a road in the Santa Rita Mountains southeast of Tucson,
Babb found a flattened Mexican opossum. Later, he saw one a few
miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border. The discovery forced Babb to
rethink the theory that the animals had been introduced by people
into Arizona. He kept records of a number of road-killed opossums,
and he shared his unexpected findings with two colleagues, Dan
Brown and, later, Jack Childs, who had caught the creatures on
camera while researching jaguars crossing the border.

After collecting records and taking pictures, they dug through old
records and found an account of Mexican opossums in Arizona as far
back as the 1870s. The animal was also mentioned in a journal kept
by a trapper in 1825. They concluded that the opossum had likely
arrived during a northern emigration 200 years ago from northern
Sonora, Mexico, along with javelinas and the raccoon-like
coatimundi.

Babb’s hunts for roadkill have given
him other insights as well. He says that for wildlife, cities are
like bombs: The closer you are to the epicenter, the more
destructive the impact. The farther out you go, the richer and more
abundant the animal life becomes.

Roads suck the life out
of wild places, he says. When rural roads are first paved, they
become great places to find cool dead stuff. But that’s only
true for a while; then the animal populations sink. He describes a
road near Maricopa where sidewinders were once so common that he
stopped pulling over for every one. Today, it’s rare for him
to see one.

What causes the drop in numbers is open to
speculation, he says. Not surprisingly, wild animals shy away from
busy roads, but part of the decline in roadkill can probably be
attributed to collectors. "The people that field-collect reptiles
will seek out these roads," he says. "The animals near the road get
collected very quickly, especially anything interesting or
unusual."

His remedy for roadkill? "Build less roads, and
pave less roads. Leave rural roads dirt, y’know, the ones
that are there. There’s a lot of other things that live here
other than us, but we never, ever, give them any thought."

"We’re here to mitigate
suffering"

I first learned about Kathy Kirsh last summer
from my sister Nancy, who lives in Portland, Ore. Kirsh, who
provides a sanctuary for abused and orphaned animals just outside
Eugene in Veneta, had given Nancy’s 17-year-old son, Dusty
— my nephew — a place to stay during the Oregon Country
Fair. Throughout the long summer weekend of countercultural
vaudeville, originally started by the late Ken Kesey, Kirsh stands
by for animal emergencies. This alone relieved my sister. Who
wouldn’t trust her child to the kind of person who looks
after abandoned Frisbee-catching dogs?

When I finally
trekked to Kirsh’s seven-acre compound one December morning
not long ago, I found her bundled up against the damp cold,
standing on her tiptoes, trying to hang a bird feeder from a low
tree branch. Barely five feet tall, her long graying hair tucked
into a hat and crow’s feet radiating from her brown eyes, she
accepted my help and tried to calm her two dogs: Annie, a stray
found near death in a parking lot, and Leah, a dog who did not make
the cut as a seeing eye guide. "And that is Uncle Seymour, also a
rescue," she said, pointing to a donkey that followed us around
surreptitiously.

Twenty years ago, Kirsh saw a seagull
with a fishhook stuck in its beak, its neck wrenched around by the
fishing line entwined in its legs. She went to pick it up, but the
bird tried to fly, and when it lifted off, a car hit it. Kirsh
stood helpless and watched it die.

Kirsh has
transformed this patch of woods into a refuge, which we tour as the
dogs bound ahead. At the top of the hill across from her house is a
building that serves as a nursery for baby mammals. Her barn is a
shelter for all sorts of wildlife, as well as for the residents of
the adjacent "cattery," an astonishing playground for the partly
feral cats she’s rescued. Primitive enclosures scattered
about the property provide shelter for everything from a gray
squirrel to fawns. Many of the animals were injured or orphaned by
cars.

Inside her small home, with its antiques and animal
knickknacks, Kirsh built a fire in the woodstove. Winter gives
Kirsh a chance to catch her breath, to prepare for spring when she
sometimes cares for dozens of orphans. "My biggest year, I had 32
raccoon babies, five fawns, and I don’t know how many bush
bunnies, flying squirrels, ground squirrels and chipmunks," she
said.

Kirsh, a former grade school teacher, is a board
member of the Lane County Wildlife Homecare Network. The nonprofit
provides injured animals with caging, medication and formula, as
well as access to medical care from local veterinarians. Local
businesses donate pet food. The Wild Oats grocery store chain
donates produce it cannot sell, rather than sending it to the
landfill.

Working with animals, Kirsh has learned a great
deal about their behavior. Baby animals, especially fawns and
raccoons, tend to stay with their mother’s body, she said.
This puts the offspring at great risk, especially if the
mother’s body is lying in the road. Opossum babies remain
hidden inside their mother’s warm pouch.

"Skunks
are not very smart. They have tiny brains, poor eyesight and
hearing. All they have is the ability to ward off predators and us
with their odor," she said. "Deer are without guile. They’re
sweet and terribly trusting. Raccoons cry real tears. They get
their feelings hurt. They want to be held and cuddled.
They’re close to human babies."

Kirsh rarely drives
at night, for fear of hitting an animal. She goes long periods
without using her car at all. When she does drive, she carries
everything she needs to rescue injured animals — a salmon net
with a long handle, two sizes of pet carriers, baby wipes for her
hands, plastic bags, and elbow-length leather gloves to ward off
fangs and claws. Kirsh wishes that more people who hit animals
would stop to see if they’re actually dead. If they are,
motorists ought to drag them off the road, she says, so that other
animals, whether offspring or scavengers, won’t get hit as
well.

If an animal is injured she recommends calling the
local sheriff or Humane Society for help, because most communities
have wildlife rehabilitators experienced with rescues.

"Don’t just toodle on by when you see something struggling,
wishing you could do something. Stop. Make a call," she said.
"Death is not the worst thing. What’s repugnant is the
suffering. They have the same central nervous system as we have.
They experience the same pain.

"A living
experiment"

In the shadow of Arizona’s Mogollon
Rim, where sandstone escarpments rise above a mixed conifer forest,
travelers driving from Payson to Heber pass a series of signs
modeled after old Burma Shave signs: "THEY SAW AN ELK," reads the
first — "OH WHAT A THRILL," says the second — "UNTIL
THEY SMASHED IT" — "ON THE GRILL."

The Arizona
Department of Transportation put up the signs to urge drivers to
slacken their speed. Colliding with a long-legged, 600-pounds-plus
elk often kills the animal, and sometimes the motorist, too.

The first time I saw these signs, though, they were
punctuated with gore: A bull elk carcass lay stretched beneath the
last sign, its organs removed by scavengers. Long black skid marks
angled across the road toward the highway’s shoulder.

Trying to change human behavior is often a lesson in
futility. So the Arizona Department of Transportation is trying to
change animal behavior instead. When it came time to expand this
rural two-lane road to accommodate more traffic, the department
looked for ways to keep elk from ambling onto the pavement.

Putting up fences alone was not a solution because the
animals needed to cross the road. Resident herds make frequent
crossings, and migratory herds pass through the area in early
spring and late fall. In early 2000, after nearly a decade of
planning for this $250 million road project, the scrapers and
dozers arrived, not only to pave the way for more vehicles, but
also to construct passageways under the road for the wildlife.

Although used in Europe and Canada for decades, wildlife
crossing structures are a relatively new feature on American
highways. The project’s lead biologist, Norris Dodd of the
Arizona Game and Fish Department, says, "The whole thing is a
living experiment." Using a process called "adaptive management,"
he and his research team study elk movement across each section of
new highway. Then the team makes design recommendations for the
next section, as well as for retrofitting the already-completed
part.

The project is important, says Dodd, because it
involves all-too-rare cooperation between state wildlife and
transportation agencies. And it saves not only lives, but also
money: "We are evaluating what works and what doesn’t work to
be able to spend wisely."

Last summer, Dodd invited me
into the field. With their vanilla rumps, chocolate coats and
sculptural antlers, elk are majestic. The fieldwork, however, is
hardly glamorous. On a midsummer morning, just after daybreak, we
discovered a cow elk in a trap the research team had set the day
before, pacing and butting at the nylon webbing that held her
captive. Dodd and his colleague, biologist Jeff Gagnon, slipped
lariats under the edge of the trap, securing the animal’s
left-hind and right-front hooves, then pulled. As the elk’s
legs splayed, she slid to the ground.

The elk’s
breath was hard, shallow and quick, her eyes on the forest behind
us. The biologists pinned her to the ground and blindfolded her,
which calmed her, as they fitted her with a numbered ear tag and a
radio collar to track her movement. Just minutes later, the elk was
released and went racing away across the meadow. The experience was
traumatic for the elk, Dodd says, but nothing compared to being hit
by a car or truck.

Later in the day, we toured some of
the crossing structures, where the researchers get more detailed
information from elaborate surveillance systems. Gagnon sets up
tiny boxes outfitted with infrared beams. When an animal breaks the
beam, it trips a video camera that records it as it approaches an
opening, either enters or retreats, and exits the other side. Once
the team gathers plenty of footage, they analyze the animals’
behavior to discover what conditions need to be present for elk to
brave the new features in the landscape.

What have the
researchers discovered? Given the choice of crossing a road or
going through a tunnel, elk prefer the former. One section of the
road, opened before the fencing was completed, turned into a
"slaughter zone," says Dodd, when elk slipped between gaps in the
fence and became trapped in the road. No collisions have occurred
since the gaps were closed in December, forcing elk to use a nearby
underpass.

Elk prefer structures that are natural-looking
and have wide openings through which they can see light and cover
at the far end. At Little Green Valley, two crossings within a few
hundred yards of each another are designed differently, although
both are about the same size and lead into the same meadow. Elk shy
away from the one with straight, concrete walls and a ledge that
might provide a perch for a hungry cougar.

For the
resident elk, Gagnon says, the structures have become part of life.
The migratory elk hesitate more, but the team expects they will
eventually get used to the crossings. The animals have already made
3,000 trips through one finished crossing, where there had
previously been a high collision rate.

The work
represents a big step forward for the scientific discipline of road
ecology. Although in its infancy, road ecology is influencing
transportation projects in most Western states, including Arizona,
California, Colorado, Montana and Washington. The University of
Montana’s Western Transportation Institute and environmental
groups like the Wildlands Project, Wildlands CPR, Southern Rockies
Ecosystem Project, Yellowstone to Yukon, Defenders of Wildlife and
San Juan Corridors Coalition all contribute to an emerging
groundswell of initiatives devoted to protecting Western wildlife
from roads.

Mixed blessings

Like any romance, our love of
the road offers mixed blessings — exhilaration, thrills,
escape, excitement, danger. Auto mobility seduces us all with an
illusion of freedom, but it comes at great cost, and not only at
the gas pump: A lot of blood spills for this intoxicating object of
affection.

Somewhere along the way we lost touch with our
humanity and replaced it with dangerous, unsustainable,
self-centered behavior. Too focused on getting quickly to our
destination, we forget that there is a vast world teeming with life
beyond the view framed by our windshields. But roadkill, which has
become as ubiquitous in the landscape as mile markers, offers
reminders.

In my worst moments, I’ve thought I must
be a freak for being obsessed with roadkill. But my quest has shown
me that there are lots of people driven to confront this tragedy
head-on, in their own idiosyncratic ways. They have entrusted me
with their stories, taken me on trips into the desert, shared
meals, and opened their homes and even their hearts to me.

The roadkill community is an underground culture that
stretches from coast to coast. It is made up of people who cannot
look away from those mangled and eviscerated mounds of animal
flesh, lovely pelts draped over jumbled bones, flightless wings
bent and fanned out against the ground, and diamond scales that end
where a rattle once shook a warning.

These people
understand that ignoring this violence only feeds our tendency to
look the other way when confronted with violence against other
human beings. Our wheeled boxes of mechanized metal disconnect us
not only from the natural world, but also from one another.

I am happy to report that I have many more stories to
tell about people who are committed to making it safe for animals
to walk across this wondrous spinning hunk of heaven to get a drink
or find a bite to eat. A species ingenious enough to invent the
automobile is certainly capable of devising the means to allow
animals to get where they need to go, too.

While we work
on this momentous task, I will keep my pitchfork handy to scoop
animals from the asphalt and lay them to rest on the porous earth,
where their remains will nourish the living. I will continue to
offer my apologies, comforted by the knowledge that there are
others out there who feel the same way.

The
author writes from Bend, Oregon.

]]>No publisherWildlifeArtNew MexicoArticleNew Mexicans move to make roads more
wildlife-friendlyhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/279/14901
In New Mexico, local residents are working with schoolkids
and activists to find ways to prevent roadkill in dangerous Tijeras
Canyon TIJERAS CANYON, New
Mexico — Standing in the doorway of his taxidermy shop, Roy
Cogburn gestures toward Dead Man’s Curve, a sharp bend in
historic Route 66 as it climbs east out of Albuquerque through the
steep-walled Tijeras Canyon. The spot might better be named
Roadkill Curve. Lying between the Sandia and Manzano mountain
ranges, Tijeras Canyon provides an important path for wildlife
moving between prime habitats. Yet numerous lanes of traffic on
both Route 66 and Interstate 40, concrete "Jersey" barriers and
chain-link fences make travel tough for animals.

When he
walks to work, Cogburn notices where the animals move through the
canyon, and where they’re most apt to get hit by passing cars
and trucks. In the past 10 years he’s "seen 50 deer, one
bobcat and a gray fox dead down the road here," he says.
"That’s what happens when we move where they live."

"This is a major corridor for animals. They have to either go under
the roads (in culverts) or cross the freeway," says Louise Waldron,
who has stopped by Cogburn’s shop to invite him to a meeting
of local residents who are trying to stop the vehicular slaughter.

As Albuquerque has sprawled beyond city limits in recent
years, residential development has sprouted up in the canyon,
meaning that there are more vehicles on the road moving at faster
speeds. That spells trouble for wildlife. Waldron was among the
canyon residents who successfully fought off a proposed housing
development in Tres Pistoles, a popular trailhead. Now, she’s
determined to do something about the roads.

Leaving
Cogburn’s shop, Waldron drives up the canyon. A hodgepodge of
humble older homes, large new houses, a smattering of businesses,
churches, blank billboards, and fences galore, the canyon is rife
with old grievances and new wealth. Waldron points out well-worn
paths made by animals. Sadness and outrage mingle in her voice as
she talks about the black bear and deer she’s seen lying
ravaged on the asphalt. "Nobody planned for these animals," she
says.

Islands of habitat

Every day
on U.S. roads, an estimated 1 million animals get killed, according
to the Humane Society. Yet roads also have less obvious impacts.
They cut the landscape into pieces, severing linkages between
habitats and isolating animal populations. Roads and the sprawl
they encourage threaten the mountainous sanctuaries for black bear,
mountain lions and mule deer.

North of Tijeras Canyon,
"The Sandia (Mountains) are at risk of turning into an isolated
island of habitat," says Mark Watson, New Mexico Game and Fish
habitat specialist. "All these animals are getting whacked on I-40,
because there is no way for them to cross Tijeras Canyon along
historic migration and travel corridors that they need to find
food, water and mates." Watson says decades of research have shown
how habitat loss and fragmentation reduce the ability of remaining
habitat islands to support the same number of species, causing some
to go extinct (HCN, 4/26/99: Visionaries or Dreamers?).

Two years ago, participants in a workshop, organized by Watson and
the New Mexico Carnivore Working Group, found 30 places around the
state in need of attention to reduce highway impacts on animal
populations. The group identified Tijeras Canyon as one of four
places of critical concern for wildlife.

Watson says they
used information about habitat connectivity of major public lands,
and the presence of threatened and endangered species, as well as
animal-vehicle collisions obtained from state police reports. Crash
data is only partly reliable, Watson says, because many collisions
go unreported. He says a large truck can wipe out more than one
deer at a time, yet keep going. Sometimes, animals may survive the
initial hit, but wander off the road to die later.

Slow: wildlife crossing

In response to rising
numbers of animal-vehicle collisions on its highways, the New
Mexico Department of Transportation has started a series of
projects aimed at making road-crossing safer for wildlife. The
state’s first wildlife mitigation project, north of Aztec on
U.S. 550, incorporated a combination of measures to try to keep
animals off the most dangerous road in New Mexico.

When
the department expanded the road to four lanes, road builders
installed three miles of deer fencing, three wildlife underpasses,
two one-way gates and specially made deer guards in an attempt to
keep animals out of the right-of-way. Although the structures have
not yet been evaluated for effectiveness, participants on a recent
field trip found hoof tracks in the box culverts under the road
— a hopeful sign.

Two years ago, this project
inspired passion from an unexpected but potent segment of the
population: schoolkids. Each year, students involved with Wild
Friends, a program organized by the University of New
Mexico’s Center for Wildlife Law, testify at the legislature
in Sante Fe on a topic of their choice.

"When roadkill
appeared on the ballot, it won by a landslide," says Carolyn Byers,
program director.

The students argued convincingly on the
behalf of wild animals, and remarkably, the legislature acted,
passing House Joint Memorial 3 in 2003. Sponsored by Rep. Mimi
Stewart, a former teacher, this nonbinding memorial urges the New
Mexico Department of Game and Fish and the Department of
Transportation to work together to help reduce animal vehicle
collisions on New Mexico roads.

In May, a group formed
the Tijeras Canyon Safe Passage Coalition with the goal of creating
a wildlife crossing on I-40.